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Federal Shutdown Would Have Minimal Minn. Impact

A view of the US Capitol Building on April 6, 2011 in Washington, DC. The federal government is facing a potential shutdown on April 8 if members of Congress and the White House are not able to agree on a budget.

(credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A temporary shutdown of the federal government would mean some closed federal offices and parks in Minnesota — but the mail, jails and airports would be unaffected.

A shutdown could happen if Congress fails to reach agreement on a spending bill this week, although it’s unclear how long that would last.

U.S. Postal Service spokesman Peter Nowacki says the postal service is self-funded through postage and other operations, so thousands of postal workers in Minnesota would keep working.

But Raymond Morris with the Federal Executive Board of Minnesota says state’s national parks and forests would close.

Morris says passport offices and offices of the Internal Revenue Service would likely be closed and scaled back to a skeleton crew of workers.

This is not a good thing. If you want less government involvement, you scale back government institutions over a gradual period, so that third party/free market solutions have time to be found and to flourish.

How does thousands of people going without paychecks make this a good thing?

People need to lean on their elected officials to not piss OUR taxdollars down their legs by bailing out third world countries and fighting 2 wars and trying to get into a third one. That would mean more than thousands of hard working, taxpaying government workers going without pay.

How is it going to help our country with thousands of taxpaying government employees not being paid? Your argument makes no sense.

The best thing that could happen is the lawmakers WE as in US as in you, Ben Ober, and everyone else that voted, hear from US taxpaying citizens and demand that they quit paying out for two wars, and dumping billions of dollars into other countries.

You can go online and find the pay of every government employee by pay grade, and figure 30% of their pay goes to pay taxes, multiply that by the roughly 800,000 employees that would be affected by this shutdown and see how small of an impact government payroll really is.

Yes, it is a paid vacation for some feds. Others will have to work, though. It depends on the funding of the jobs involved. Some jobs are funded by fees (such as alien green card fees), and those employees will stay on the job. Others are mission critical and need to stay on the job. This is a ridiculous situation. The political equivalent of two gunfighters squaring off in the middle of the street!